Telling Stories of Domestic Slavery in India

By REMY TUMIN

December 4, 2017

The lush floodplains of Dooars, India, appear to go on forever. Nestled in the foothills of the Himalayas, the green is so vibrant it is all consuming.

But beyond the riverbeds, in an area once known for its bustling tea gardens, Dooars’s dirt roads can be perilous. They are barely proper roads, and the commute to school by foot is long and dangerous, making girls easy targets for attackers and traffickers.

“They’re like fishermen waiting for the bait,” said Smita Sharma, a photojournalist documenting survivors and their families.

The area has become a hub for domestic servitude trafficking. Girls as young as 10 are put in households through traffickers posing as placement agencies. They are almost always taken by someone they know — a relative, a neighbor, an acquaintance — and sold for $300 to $1,000. Ms. Sharma had already been working over the last three years on documenting survivors of sexual violence in India. But she kept coming across women who had been trafficked and sold into domestic servitude, an industry she says gets little attention in comparison.

“These girls are not in demand in the sex industry because they are too dark and skinny. That is why they are sold as domestic slaves,” Ms. Sharma said. “If they were more fleshy or voluptuous, they would be in high demand in the sex trade.”

S., 40, shows a photograph of her daughter R., who has has been missing since 2009.

Smita Sharma

Employers engage the services of placement agencies, looking for domestic help, but what they don’t know is that some of these girls arrived via a modern day slave trade. They were kidnapped, sold to placement agencies and then put in houses for domestic work. Each handler — from kidnapper to agency — receives a commission. Some people try to justify the trafficking in servants as being beneficial to the young victims. “People have this attitude that these people are poor, if I’m taking her and giving her shelter and food that’s enough,” Ms. Sharma said. “But that’s not enough, that is against human rights violations.”

Ms. Sharma, who splits her time between Delhi and Calcutta, has met at least 30 women who are survivors of the region’s trafficking. She has partnered with Shakti Vahini, an anti-trafficking organization, and local police to connect her to trafficking survivors and the families of missing girls.

“Sometimes they’ve been abused in the houses, and many of them are beaten up badly,” Ms. Sharma said. “You have to make them comfortable and make them trust you, but they do share their stories.”

People in the region make on average $1.50 a day, if employed at all, Ms. Sharma said. Tea gardens were once the backbone of the local economy, home to tea growing operations, hospitals and even schools. But once the British left in 1947, so too did the jobs, forcing people to look elsewhere for work. Many collect stones from the riverbed that are sold for construction.

While offers of domestic work can sound attractive to an impoverished teenager, the reality is horrific. One girl was kidnapped, taken on a train and raped outside a connecting railway station. She somehow escaped, eventually making her way back to her village with a police escort. The girl was taken to the police station along with her attacker. But the perpetrator’s relatives antagonized her and pressured her to withdraw her charges. The girl wasn’t even allowed to see her parents, in hopes of weakening her.

S., 46, at work at a tea garden near Malbazar. S.’s daughter, A., 14, has been missing since 2012. S. suspects that a neighbor kidnapped her daughter and sold her.

Smita Sharma

Ms. Sharma said it was so easy to set up a placement agency, that some of the families of the young women were unaware how they ended up as domestic servants. In one case, a mother of three who was a victim of domestic violence went to her mother for safety. But her mother couldn’t take her in. That’s when a man promised her a good job in the city. Instead, she was sold into servitude and placed in a house. It took a year before the woman broke down and told her employers how she had ended up in their home. The police were eventually contacted, and the woman was returned home to her husband.

While Ms. Sharma is listening to and telling the stories of survivors and their families, she’s also healing a wound of her own. When Ms. Sharma was 18, a professor molested her one day after school. But when she spoke out about it, she was told she was “over smart” and “didn’t know how to respect my elders,” she said.

That’s why she became a photojournalist. After studying in New York, she returned to India to begin her work on photographing survivors of sexual violence in India.

Today, she’s more driven than ever.

“I lost total confidence,” she said, “and I thought, ‘I have to do something with my life that’s meaningful and one day when I speak up, people are going to listen.’”